Protocolo de acciones

This review highlighted how challenging it is for community-based child protection groups to address highly sensitive issues of child protection and well-being. This challenge reflects not

only the complexity of the issues themselves, but the difficulties of discussing and changing harmful practices that are widespread, yet viewed as normal and in the best interests of children. The programme example presented in Section 5.1 on the reduction of FGM suggests that ending such practices is a slow process in which change comes from within the community through processes of dialogue and critical reflection. Although outside agencies can play a facilitative role, they are most effective when they embed work on child protection in work on wider development projects, and when they avoid imposing outsider concepts through, for example, didactic, top-down processes.

The reviewed documents indicated that current approaches to facilitating and supporting community-based child protection groups have not incorporated these lessons in addressing sensitive problems that are resistant to change. This review indicated that, at present, there is an over-reliance on didactic, top-down approaches, and a failure to start with where communities are. To some extent, didactic approaches may stem from the desire of agencies, donors, and governments to produce results in the short term. Although the press for immediate results is understandable, short-term approaches cannot by themselves change the sources of long-term harm to children. As discussed below, the desire for immediate results is not the only

consideration that promotes the use of didactic approaches.

6.4.1 Importance of a dialogical approach

Many of the reviewed documents indicated that programmes had sought to raise community awareness about children’s rights. As discussed above (Section 4.2.1), there is a significant difference between child rights and child protection, yet there is also overlap in work to support the realisation of children’s protection rights and children’s wider rights. Except for child rights committees, most community-based child protection groups did not use child rights as their entry point to work on child protection, and they focused more on child protection issues rather than on wider child rights. Nevertheless, many groups had received training on child rights, and had introduced child rights language and concepts at community level as part of their work on child protection and well-being. In doing so, the group members used mostly didactic approaches, and did not take adequate steps to learn about and discuss indigenous understandings and concepts about what is good for children. The failure to undertake this discussion makes local people feel disrespected, and misses an important opportunity to relate rights concepts to the local discourse. Probably the biggest problems with this didactic approach to promoting children’s rights are that it communicates disrespect for local culture, and fails to stimulate the genuine dialogue and self-critical reflection that lead to social change. Didactic, top-down approaches are antithetical to a dialogical approach, which enables ongoing dialogue, information exchange, analysis of different views, and critical reflection and decision-making by the community about what is in the best interests of its children. The efficacy of dialogical approaches that are driven by local people is apparent from the results of recent studies of how to reduce harmful practices such as FGM.135 Human rights concepts are fundamental to the process of social change, yet are useful when the community has developed its own ways of speaking about these concepts, and there has emerged a cadre of internal change agents who stimulate and guide the process of social change.

       135

Didactic approaches are also weak because they present children’s rights in a

decontextualised manner that connects poorly with people’s everyday lives and experience. For example, during telephone interviews, one experienced practitioner told how a child protection worker spoke in an abstract manner about child rights during a heavy downpour to refugees who lacked basic necessities such as shelter. No connection was made between children’s rights and the obvious fact that it was raining and the refugees had no shelter.136 In such situations,

community members are likely to regard child rights as abstractions that do not apply to them.

6.4.2 Learning from and with local communities

The didactic, top-down approach to raising awareness about child rights is one small part of a much larger problem, wherein community-based child protection groups have tended not to learn about and build upon existing cultural assets such as religious leaders, traditional healers, and cleansing rituals, among many others. As discussed above (Section 4.3.2), many reviewed programmes showed little evidence of having attempted to identify, engage with, and build upon local cultural resources. This limited the impact of the externally facilitated child-focused groups because there were low levels of community ownership, and because there was a sense among local people that the supports being developed were alien to their culture.

Why child-focused agencies have tended not to learn about, and build upon, existing cultural and social mechanisms is a question that merits additional inquiry and reflection. One possibility is that the press of time and the urgency of achieving immediate results undermined the use of a slower process of learning about and engaging with what is already there. However, many community-based child protection groups were implemented in long-term development settings, where a slower process was feasible. Another possibility is that many child protection workers lacked the ethnographic skills that are needed to learn systematically about and document properly local beliefs, practices, and resources. This hypothesis has merit, in that many child protection workers may be mechanistic in their use of skills such as asset mapping, and may not analyse well how to use such tools or to interpret the data they yield in a particular context. A third possibility is that external child protection agencies and workers lack the full range of attitudes, values, and skills that are needed to work in a respectful, engaged, dialogical manner with local people.137 In fact, they may have had negative attitudes that demonised or dismissed local culture, or framed it as the problem that needs to be changed. Alternatively, they may have seen themselves as the ‘experts’, who were in the best position to address harmful cultural practices. Such stereotypes and arrogant attitudes can blunt the motivation to take the dialogical approach that has been shown to be most effective in enabling communities to address

effectively the most sensitive child protection issues. Even if the motivation were present, external agencies and community child protection workers may lack the skills needed to

facilitate or engage effectively in a dialogical, protracted process of social change. A significant challenge, then, is how to select, prepare, and support agency staff and community workers who

       136

Personal communtcation with Stephen Hanmer, June 2, 2009. 137

 Program on Forced Migration and Health, The Interagency Learning Initiative, and The Displaced Children and  Orphans Fund (2008). 

can effectively take a dialogical approach that enables community change, and who can help to build the wider child protection systems.

The didactic approach was also problematic, since it tacitly disrespected local people and marginalised their voices, assets, and practices. It embodied a failure to start off by listening to the community, learning about its understandings of children and what they need to be well (as defined in local terms). The failure to listen to communities signals that outsiders, not local people, are in a position to identify and address problems, thereby disenfranchising the community and undermining their sense of ownership of problems of abuse, exploitation, and violence against children.

To learn from and with communities in a dialogic approach, it will be important to avoid inappropriate practices that were visible in the review, and to:

• Listen to the community about how it conceptualises children and the roles of young people, parents, and communities.

• Learn what the community already does to protect and care for children.

• Learn about and build upon community assets and strengths in protecting children. • Enable deep dialogue and critical reflection within communities about what is harmful to

children, and what enables children’s protection and well-being.

Work to end harmful practices also requires avoidance of the extremes of either dismissing local cultural practices as harmful, or romanticising them. An appropriate balance ought to be achieved wherein agencies (1) identify, engage with, and build upon local cultural resources and practices where they are useful and not harmful, and (2) identify and work to change harmful practices through a dialogic process guided by community members. The achievement of this balance will require cultural awareness, a spirit of appreciative inquiry, and a critical approach guided by human rights standards. This combination of elements will enable the creation of a new generation of practice that does not impose its approach on communities, and is oriented toward enabling positive change from within communities.